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… so I am just using this connector for its last hours. I feel lucky that my partner realized they had a spare computer at work. It belonged to a postdoc who left Madrid (…) so it was just lying there in a box. I can take it for some weeks, not to Colombia, but for a while here in Madrid.
Last night I began downloading the programs I need to be able to work with this computer. I tried to use the in-built migration program, but it didn’t work, so I am doing it manually. I have my Dropbox now and it’s downloading a ton of files, I have installed my Firefox with all my bookmarks, my Evernote, which doesn’t work, because it needs an upgrade. I need to reinstall the program I am using to write. Making the workplace is not a straightforward thing—every time there’s something new, some different complication. This time, it involves making these borrowed objects mine through a series of technical transformations. Depending on the objects I borrow, this can take many hours—days, even.
These three desktops are workplaces for me at the moment (Figures 4.4, 4.5, and 4.6):
Figure 4.4: Source: Photo by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
Figure 4.5: Source: Photo by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
Figure 4.6: Source: Photo by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
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internet and mobility
Technology is designed with explicit purposes and then lived and interpreted by its users in many different ways. What follows is part of a larger project on mobile freelancers (Hakim-Fernández, 2017)—people who do creative and/or intellectual, mostly project-based work, change workplaces and employers frequently, and are constantly on the move, physically and psychically. Mobility is at the heart of this study, and it includes both bodily movement and the flows of information that make the internet what it is. Mobile freelancers don’t just “use” the internet and don’t just “move” as a lifestyle; they experience and interpret the internet in specific ways while being mobile. I make sense of their experience through Tim Cresswell’s (2006, 2014) take on mobility, defined as “movement + meaning + power” (2014, p. 108). This entails both flows and frictions, the latter referring to how power structures and the location of people within it hinder free mobility, not stopping flows completely—as there is no such thing as lack of movement—but redirecting it through specific paths. How we experience and articulate the internet—as a tool, as a place, as a way of being—depends on our capacity to move freely, and the meanings that mobility take, both in positive or negative terms.
While travelling for work and working while in movement are not exclusive to mobile freelancing, doing this without a regular office location or a traditional employment contract is. Mobile freelancers like me are responsible for securing our own jobs—often project-based, often several at a time to make ends meet. The work itself, the place of work, and the schedule of work is for most of us unpredictable. This differentiates mobile freelancers from previous iterations of independent workers (i.e. small shopkeepers in Spain), for whom activities were clearer, there was an established place for commerce, and “high” and “low” seasons were more predictable. Mobility, instability, and a constant ‘workplace-making’ make mobile freelancers a specific life condition, and this life condition frames how the internet is lived and understood. As Alvaro, one of my informants, a postdoc and adjunct ←38 | 39→professor at a public University of Barcelona comments: “[i];t is an imposed situation. It’s like a permanent instability, in which stability is instability … a stability that never arrives. I feel I focus my energies on searching a stability that will never come.”
what is the internet for mobile freelancers?
For the freelancers I studied, the internet is the foundation of their jobs, and the mobile phone the core embodiment of the internet. In the following I explore this through their experiences of materiality, workplace-making and (dis)connection.
Materiality
The “essential survival kit” for mobile freelancers consists of a laptop, a mobile phone, an internet connection, and the complements needed—a notepad and pen, adaptors, keys, money, identification documents, a bottle of water and sometimes something to eat. This set is enough to “do everything,” as Constantí notes. However, the most important in this set is still the internet. Markham (2003), building on McLuhan’s ideas about media, emphasized the internet as a prosthesis. It provides “vital tools with which we alter the fundamental processes of getting things done.” (p. 3). “No internet means I can’t do any work. Like when my laptop broke I had to install some backups (…) [from] the internet (…) so really the internet is the most important thing to have.” Loli, a freelancer sociologist and consultant based in Barcelona said “the internet is like electricity to me.”
As a material reality, the internet is associated with a screen, and in this case, the mobile screen of a smartphone or a laptop computer. As Laura puts it, her laptop computer screen is important because: “It is a window to the world.” Interestingly, Nuria, a freelance web-designer also uses this analogy: “To me, the internet is a window to everything, to work, to my friends who live in other cities, (…) to knowledge.” The devices, particularly the screens, are described as the contact points between two worlds. The freelancers use words like “cyberspace” or “virtual world” (“ciberspacio” and “vitual” in Spanish), which could be read to mean they perceive the internet as a place, but it is not the place that is most salient to them, or where they are situated themselves. Instead, they seem to use these terms to describe their sense of distance from a reality that would be invisible if it wasn’t for the computer or mobile screen. So the more meaningful metaphor for them may be the idea that the internet is a prosthesis, a conduit.
For many freelancers, there’s a tension between the obvious materiality of the device and the invisibility of what we do, or what happens “inside” the computer ←39 | 40→or the mobile. As Jason Farman (2012) notes when discussing the ideas of visibility and invisibility in locative mobile technologies, most communication technology is designed to be experienced as invisible, and this explains in part why we think of our mobile phones or laptop computers, together with the internet, as immaterial.
Most of the labor performed by knowledge workers, mobile freelancers no exception, is invisible. Muriel’s parents, who have experienced work as being visible and touchable, cannot “see” the results of their daughter’s work, which gives them a perception of her not having a “real job.” She says: “It’s not as if I was watching YouTube videos all day! I have to work a lot to be able to get a paid job.” Without stacks of papers on desks, and without an office where it’s clearer—in a traditional sense—that work happens, it’s difficult to visualize for others the materiality of our work.
But the materiality of the internet manifest in a variety of frictions (Cresswell, 2006, 2014) in our daily lives. Sometimes the invisible becomes quite materially apparent. Alvaro had to take a trip to a Central-American country, where he was to teach a class. His laptop broke just a week before, so he had to bring an old laptop, which would only turn on when connected to a power source. Alvaro had to worry about not being able to turn it on during security checks at the stop-over airport in the USA. He also couldn’t use the precious flight time to prepare his classes. When